5

The allotted hour was over, but the first-year students in the history faculty’s lecture hall showed no sign of leaving. Dr Leo Black did his best to referee the spiky debate that had erupted following his presentation on President Truman’s decision to drop the atom bomb.

‘He called them animals. He dismissed the whole population as sub-human in order to justify himself. It was the leaders who were the criminals, not the ordinary people, not the women and children. Any leader who claims to be civilized has an absolute duty to do everything in his power to avoid killing innocent civilians. Truman did the opposite.’ The young woman in the front row spoke with arresting passion. Helen Mount was never shy of voicing her opinions both in class and in the columns of Cherwell, the university’s most prestigious student newspaper. She had earned a reputation as a political radical and fierce opponent of anything that smacked of injustice. ‘If he wanted to prove that fighting on was futile, why not drop a bomb somewhere uninhabited? Why not show the Japanese High Command what it could do and give them the option of surrender? He had other options, but he didn’t take them. He went straight in and destroyed a whole city. If that isn’t a war crime, I don’t know what is.’

‘Powerful point,’ Black said. ‘Does anyone want to come back on that?’

No one took up the offer. Most of the students present were wary of challenging Helen in any debate in which she held strong opinions. The usual outcome was humiliation.

‘Well, if you’re all agreed –’

‘I don’t agree with that.’ The voice came from a seat in the back row of the hall. It belonged to a young man Black couldn’t recall having seen before. He was seated alone with empty seats either side of him. The left half of his face was hidden behind a curtain of blond fringe. ‘The US only had two bombs ready at the time and Truman needed to make them count. Nobody likes what happened, but it didn’t kill many more than the fire-bombing of Tokyo. You can call it a crime as much as you like, but it would have been a far bigger crime not to have used it. Millions might have died, not just thousands.’

‘I’m saying he had a duty to take all reasonable steps,’ Helen shot back. ‘Unless we act according to humanitarian principals, we’re not even worthy of being called human.’

‘So it’s just the procedure you object to, is it? Let’s say he did try dropping one as a warning but the Japanese had fought on regardless. Would bombing Hiroshima have been justified then? The innocent women and children would have been killed just the same.’

‘It would have been better.’

‘For whom …? Him? It would have been far worse for the hundreds being killed every day the war kept going.’

‘That’s purely hypothetical. We don’t know what would have happened. The point is, he pressed the button while he still had alternatives.’

‘OK. What if he had ignored the committee advising him to drop it and decided it was a step too far – that no civilized human being could wreak that much destruction in one go?’

‘He would have been perfectly justified.’

‘So you would have preferred him to send in thousands of conscripted American troops even though the final body count would have been far higher?’

Helen hesitated.

The young man pressed his advantage. ‘It’s a simple choice – troops or bomb? Which one is morally preferable?’

‘I don’t believe that there can ever be a moral use of an immoral weapon,’ Helen said. She sat back and crossed her arms defiantly across her chest.

Heads around the hall nodded in agreement. Helen smiled, sensing that she had neatly summed up the mood of her fellow students.

Unfazed, her opponent countered, ‘That’s irrational. You can tolerate the idea of spreading the blood of millions of civilians across the hands of thousands of soldiers, but you can’t stomach the idea of fewer deaths being caused by just one man. Luckily for us, Truman was able to make the cold calculation: kill thousands to save millions. Squeamishness like yours amounts to a death wish.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Helen snapped back. ‘Trying your best to avoid unnecessary violence is about valuing life and not wanting to cause death.’

‘You’re living in a fool’s paradise,’ the young man said. ‘History proves time after time that if you want to stay alive, it’s kill or be killed. It’s just a fact. If you truly value life you’d better be ready to rub the enemy out as fast as possible.’

‘Now you’re being childish.’

‘The world’s uglier than you want to believe. You’re the one who’s being naive.’

His response prompted a ripple of laughter.

‘All right, I think we’d better leave it there,’ Black said, sensing that constructive debate was coming to an end. ‘Next week we’ll explore General MacArthur’s reconstruction of Japan and consider the obligations of the victor.’

Helen slammed her file shut, thrust it into her bag and marched out of the door ahead of the crowd, annoyed at not having scored an emphatic victory and even more infuriated at having been laughed at. Black gathered his lecture notes into his battered canvas satchel feeling a measure of sympathy for her. He admired Helen’s youthful idealism. For a man who knew what it was to have plumbed the depths of cynicism only to sink even lower, teaching students brimming with desire to build a better future was like being cleansed. Optimism like hers gave him fresh hope each day.

He made his way to the exit. The young man with the fringe hurried down the hall steps and came after him.

‘Can I ask you something, Dr Black?’

‘Fire away.’

‘Sam Wright, by the way – I’m actually a PP student – Physics and Philosophy. A friend of mine tipped me off that you were worth listening to.’

‘I’m glad someone thinks so. What’s your question?’

‘Truman said men make history, not the other way around. Do you believe that? I mean, isn’t he the most obvious example of a man swept along by history you can think of? He’s a small-town guy from Missouri who’s appointed vice president as a compromise candidate, but then Roosevelt dies and leaves him with the gravest decision that’s ever been made. It’s like he was destined for it.’

‘It’s a tempting thought, but, no, I think I’m with Truman. I can’t see how the idea of destiny does anything to help us analyse or understand events, which is what we’re trying to do, after all. I’d have to put destiny in the category of attractive but fanciful concepts.’

Sam mulled this for a moment. ‘I heard you spent a long time in the army.’

‘A very long time.’ There had been no point in keeping it a secret from the students. A simple internet search would have revealed Black to be one of the oldest junior lecturers in the university, having been awarded his PhD only a year before at the age of forty-nine. But of the intervening quarter-century between his graduating in history and returning to his old college, there would have been no mention. If he hadn’t filled in the gap himself, rumour and gossip would soon have done it for him.

‘So why do you think you survived? Was it because you made good decisions or did you walk away from situations you shouldn’t have?’

Black considered the purpose of the question, wondering where Sam was trying to lead him. ‘A bit of both, I suppose.’

‘But you still don’t believe in destiny? Or put it another way – what if the young Hitler had died of his wounds in the trenches, or the young Churchill had been run through with a spear during his cavalry charge in the Sudan, what then?’

‘I’m not a great fan of alternative histories. Isn’t the point to learn from past experience in the hope of informing future decisions?’

‘With respect, I would argue that’s outmoded thinking.’

‘I see.’ Black tried not to feel affronted. Unlike army officers, academics were meant to welcome contradiction as a spur to new ideas, even when it came from a nineteen-year-old undergraduate. ‘In what respect exactly?’

‘Think of quantum physics –’

‘Physics?’

‘Yes. If you fire particles at two slits in a piece of card it turns out they don’t just travel in a straight line and hit the wall behind. Some of them travel through both slits, perhaps thousands, even millions of times. According to the maths, they could have taken every possible route to arrive at their destination and might even have been in several places at once. That’s mind-blowing, right? Almost inconceivable. But so is the fact that despite the randomness of their journey, they still have an ultimate destination which they all reach. They couldn’t buck their destiny.’

‘I like it. Clever,’ Black said, trying to be generous. ‘But as far as I know, there’s a practical use for quantum theory. It’s a theoretical model that explains previously inexplicable phenomena. What does your destiny model do for history?’

‘It gives ultimate meaning. Events unfold only because they’re heading towards an inevitable conclusion.’

‘Which means that we’re nothing more than puppets at the whim of some greater force?’

‘Nothing whimsical about it. There are many eminent physicists who truly believe we’re just complex robots operating according to a program. I’m not saying I like it or wish it wasn’t so. Not many accepted quantum theory or even relativity until they were proved to be true. Maybe one day we’ll learn how to rewrite the program ourselves? Maybe that’s our ultimate destiny?’

They exited through the main doors of the faculty into bright sunlight.

‘Well, it’s a fun theory, though I’m not sure it would score you many marks in finals.’

‘Watch this space. Give it ten years, I bet you it’ll be mainstream. Great lecture by the way. Five stars. I’ll be back.’ Sam smiled and hurried on down the steps.

The digital generation. They felt free to rate everything. Black tried to imagine how his old tutor, Godfrey Lane, would have reacted to being marked out of five by his students. It didn’t bear thinking about.

Black made his way along the path through the small garden that stood in front of the history faculty. On the far side of the railings the pavements of George Street were busy with students and tourists from around the globe. A group of Hungarian musicians was playing a wild reel straight from the market squares of medieval Budapest. Black was struck, as he so often was, by the extraordinary collision of so many times, places and ideas in this one small spot in the middle of England. There was something in its vibrant chaos that seemed to strike a chord with Sam’s outlandish theory of predetermination: Black couldn’t deny that on occasions he did feel as if all the tangled threads of his own complex and violent history had been winding their way here all along. To this oasis. The embodiment of all that he had fought to protect.

He stepped out into the throng and headed back towards his college. Much as he had come to feel at home in the university, his position within it was precarious. For the past year he had been a college tutor without tenure, earning a wage that barely covered his food and lodging. He wouldn’t see his army pension until he was sixty-five and nearly all of his savings, such as they were, had been swallowed up financing three years of study for his doctorate. He had applied for a junior research fellowship, but the decision, which wouldn’t be made until early September, lay with the existing college fellows, a body of men and women intensely protective of their reputation as world-class scholars. Most were avowedly liberal (though hardly liberal in the sense of being tolerant of opinions other than their own) whose politics came with an instinctive suspicion of people like him. It would take a small miracle for them to admit a fifty-year-old former soldier into their gilded circle and Black met few of their criteria. He had no body of published work and, as yet, no academic reputation to speak of. All he had to offer was an insider’s insight into the workings of the international military machine and an ambition to put that knowledge to use.

The unavoidable fact was that Black had only one realistic shot at being accepted. His twenty-two years of experience in the Special Air Service had earned him an invitation to present a paper at an international symposium at West Point Military Academy in late August. If he could make a favourable impression on the audience of generals, diplomats and strategists with his controversial thesis, he stood a chance. He merely had to convince them that nearly every conflict he had been involved with had been a disaster and that all military interventions that couldn’t be avoided should be carried out only with a minimum of arrogance and a maximum cultural understanding. ‘Just discard your entire approach over the last twenty years, ladies and gentlemen; admit you were wrong and start again.’

No one could accuse him of making life easy for himself. They would expect him to be a man of war eager to promote the idea that problem nations could be brought to heel by their billion-dollar hardware and their populations forced to submission and compliance by highly trained soldiers of just the kind he had been. Peace through superior firepower. Instead they would get a man who had come to believe that surrendering to the instinct to violence was the route to perpetual and unresolved conflict. If that’s what they wanted, so be it, but he was determined to show them there was another way. A way that meant trying to stand in your enemy’s shoes before you even fired a shot. A way that treated violence as the very last resort. If he could change his way of thinking so profoundly, so, he would argue, could they. Each time Black imagined himself at the West Point lectern, all he could picture was row upon row of startled and indignant faces. Sometimes the daydream would end with him being shut down and humiliated in mid flow by some convenient technical fault, but in more optimistic moments he fantasized that his persuasive analysis would bring the assembled company to its feet in rapturous applause, his triumph culminating in a slew of offers to become a trusted advisor to governments and NGOs around the world.

Then he would come back to earth. If he was well received, the most he could realistically hope for was a fellowship. It would mean a modest but steady wage, lend him the credibility to have his articles published in the respected journals and, crucially, the chance to have his doctorate published as a book. If he was going to change the world, it would be a long, tough slog, and he would have to earn every ounce of respect.

And if West Point proved a failure and the fellows rejected him, it wouldn’t mark the end of the world. He had a small, slightly dilapidated cottage on the slopes of the Black Mountains in the Welsh borders to retreat to, and sufficient tools in his shed and strength in his arms to scrape a living as a jobbing builder while he worked out what to do next. It was a strange crossroads at which to find himself at this late stage of his career, but after the life he had lived, he was grateful to have reached it at all.

Black emerged from Gloucester Green on to Worcester Street, dodged between passing bicycles and headed for the unassuming doorway set in the plain eighteenth-century façade of Worcester College. The inauspicious exterior hid one of the best-kept secrets in Oxford. He crossed the threshold and entered the cool shade of the cloister, its stone flags polished and foot-worn by a centuries-long procession of scholars. Framed between its supporting columns was a view over the sunken quadrangle, its rectangular lawn mown in diagonal chequerboard stripes. Beyond the elegantly crumbling sandstone wall at the quad’s far end was the Provost’s garden, whose borders were informal riots of lavender, hollyhocks and peonies, and further on still were the gently stirring trees bordering the college lake. The soft and fleeting beauty of the English summer was the thing he had missed most while on operations in the baking desert or the steamy gloom beneath the jungle canopy. He paused to impress it on his mind.

‘Idling, Leo? That’s not like you.’

Black turned to see Karen Peters emerge from the porters’ lodge clutching a pile of mail. Karen was a gifted plant biologist, a junior fellow and one of the few members of the Senior Common Room he could count as a friend. Dressed in jeans, pumps and baggy T-shirt with sunglasses balanced on her forehead, at first glance she could have been mistaken for a student. Only the faint lines at the corners of her dark green eyes gave any clue to the trauma of her previous three months. Days before she and her husband were about to conclude the purchase of their first home, he had left her for a twenty-three-year-old PhD student, taking all their savings with him. Aged thirty-four and after five years of marriage, Karen had found herself penniless, homeless and broken-hearted. Her lawyer had advised that even if she were to recover the £40,000 he had stolen from her, the legal costs would leave them both bankrupt. As a tutor in contract and family law, her husband had no doubt been aware of this fact.

Despite these disasters and being reduced to living in two poky rooms in a graduate accommodation block, Karen somehow managed to keep smiling. Fortunately, her cheating husband had been only one of two loves in her life. The other was her work: she was trying to save the dying forests of Canada and Siberia from the ravages of climate change.

‘You caught me,’ Black said. ‘I’m always a sucker for this view.’

‘How’s the paper coming along?’

‘I’ve planned it, more or less. Starting to rough it out.’

‘So what you really mean is that you haven’t actually written anything yet?’

‘I’m aiming to get a first draft down over the weekend. Hunker down till it’s done.’

‘Well, if you need another pair of eyes – not that I’m any sort of expert in your field.’

‘Thanks, as long as you’re not too hard on me – my confidence is easily knocked.’ He smiled. Karen smiled back, but Black sensed more than a desire to make harmless small talk beneath the cheerful front. ‘How are things?’ he asked.

‘OK.’ She shrugged as if to say she was managing fine, but her eyes told a different story.

Black took his cue. ‘Fancy a quick stroll?’

She nodded gratefully.

He led off down the flight of stone steps that connected the cloister to the sunken quad below. At its foot they turned right and wandered side by side along the gravel path that bordered the grass.

‘What’s happened now?’ Black asked.

‘Just another letter from Joel’s lawyers. I really shouldn’t be bothering you with it.’

‘It’s no trouble. What do they say?’

She glanced away as if she were too embarrassed to share it, but the pressure had built to the point where she couldn’t help herself. ‘They’re claiming the money was all his, that I was emotionally abusive, impossible to live with, that I was determined to frustrate his career … it just goes on and on. And there was me believing we were happily married. I know rationally that it’s all just lies designed to wear me down, but when you read something like that from someone you loved, you really do start to doubt your own sanity. You can’t help it. You start to wonder whether you really were that person … Does that sound nuts?’

‘It sounds perfectly natural. If it’s any comfort, in my limited experience of other people’s divorces, his behaviour has been pretty much typical. And the guiltier the deserter, the dirtier they fight. He won’t keep it up, though – six-month rule.’

‘Tell me.’

‘The time it takes for sanity to return. Relative sanity, anyway. Anger fades like the first flush of passion – so I’m told.’

‘Maybe I should just let it go and forget about the money. I can’t even afford to pay the lawyers’ bills I’ve already got.’

‘Anyone would be upset, but you’ve got to try not to react. If he’s being this aggressive, it probably means he’s frightened, which gives you the advantage. He’ll have told the new girl all sorts of lies about what a bad person you were, but the chances are his conscience will get to him in the end and he’ll come back with an offer.’

Karen nodded. She seemed to want to believe him, but something was nagging at her.

‘You say conscience, but … it only happened a couple of times … when we argued, he scared me. It was like there was a dark side to him that I tried to pretend wasn’t there.’

‘Did he ever hit you?’

She shook her head.

‘Threaten you?’

‘No … not explicitly.’

‘Then I shouldn’t worry. It’ll work out. It nearly always does.’

They arrived at the far corner of the quad and stopped at the foot of another set of stone steps where they would go their separate ways. Black gave her a reassuring pat on the shoulder. ‘This time next year it’ll all be a memory. I promise you.’

She nodded, her eyes brightening a little. ‘You are coming to the Provost’s drinks tonight?’

‘I’ll try.’ Black kept the fact he had entirely forgotten about the occasion to himself.

‘You’ve got to do better than that, Leo. If you want that fellowship, you have to be seen. You’ve got to make yourself part of the furniture, show them your human side. Tell them a few jokes. Soften them up a bit.’

‘I’ve never been much good at cocktail parties.’

‘That makes two of us.’ The warm breeze scattered her thick brown hair across her cheek. She pushed it away. ‘You are very popular, you know – I keep hearing students saying how great your seminars and lectures are. I’m going to make sure the Provost knows it, too. It counts for a lot.’

Black was touched. ‘Thanks. I appreciate it.’

‘Yes, well – it’s not pure altruism. For one thing I need someone I can talk to around here who isn’t on the spectrum.’ She smiled. ‘No excuses. See you later.’

Playfully waving an admonishing finger, she set off up the steps.

Black stared after her for a moment, then continued on his way. Karen was right about the need to ingratiate himself more with the masters of his fate. Her concern for him was touching. He wondered what he had done to deserve it.

He made his way to a far corner of the quad to the last in the row of a terrace of medieval cottages. From the outside his college accommodation looked charming: a centuries-old oak door set back in a weathered stone porch with roses growing around the lead-lattice window. But the reason it was assigned to a junior tutor became apparent the moment you stepped inside. The interior had remained largely unchanged from its last overhaul in the early 1960s. Apart from the laptop on the heavy Victorian desk, the study room, which took up most of the downstairs floor, looked and smelled exactly as it had done when Black had first ventured across the threshold nearly thirty years before. Then it had been occupied by his former tutor, a small, curt man who wore the same tweed jacket every day of the year and chain-smoked unfiltered Woodbines or, when he had been lucky on the horses, slim Panatela cigars. Though he had been dead for nearly fifteen years, Godfrey Lane’s presence still lingered in the pair of sagging Chesterfield sofas, the oil painting of the heavy cavalry at Waterloo above the gas fire, and the now threadbare rug his father had hauled back on a troop ship from Alexandria at the end of the Desert War. For an historian the rooms were perfect: the ancient plumbing and frigid temperatures from November through to March a constant reminder of the deprivations of the past.

Black went through to the kitchen at the back, made himself a cup of strong tea and returned to his desk. He had three clear hours before he was expected to be on parade on the Provost’s lawn. More than enough time to crack the critical opening paragraphs of his paper.

Resisting the urge to prevaricate, he hurriedly typed out the words that had been forming in the back of his mind throughout the day:

In the early years of this century I met with Afghan men in a village we had just liberated from the Taliban. They were illiterate, had never heard of President Bush or Osama Bin Laden, were unaware of the destruction of New York’s twin towers and considered us hostile invaders. The British, I soon learned, had not been forgiven for their last occupation of their country in the 1870s. The consciousness of these men stretched little further than the walls of their valley. Their minds had been formed by a mixture of tradition, folklore and the local version of Islam. The Koran teaches that the world is 4,000 years old and that is what they believed. Ignorant of science or even of the very idea of intellectual discourse, there was virtually no mechanism by which I could communicate with them except in the most basic terms.

The British and other occupying armies were, however, expected to win hearts and minds and to convert these tribal peoples into enthusiastic democrats who would discard 1,500-year-old habits, liberate their women and embrace the rule of law.

Who set those impossible tasks? Our politicians. Politicians needing votes and results. Politicians who could no sooner enter the mind of an Afghan tribesman than those of our prehistoric ancestors.

This is the truth on the ground. And only when we acknowledge the truth can we address it and find answers. Ladies and gentlemen, I am a soldier who as a result of long and regretful experience has largely ceased to believe in the ability of war to deliver peace.

Black paused to assess his progress. As an opening salvo it was certainly bold; but, on reflection, its tone was closer to that of a magazine article than learned argument. Arresting as it was, it wouldn’t do. There was too much of him in it. He couldn’t afford to be dismissed as a mere peddler of anecdotes before he had even begun. He tried again with a more impersonal, academic approach:

Conventional paradigms governing military interventions intended to oust elements hostile to native civilian populations have operated according to a number of a priori assumptions. These principally concern the willingness of newly liberated citizens to engage constructively with their liberators in the implementation of social and political policies deemed by those same liberators to be universally desirable.

He paused, imagining eyelids in the audience beginning to droop. There had to be a middle way.

The telephone rang, interrupting his train of thought. He reached for a receiver old enough to be connected by a knotted spiral of cable.

‘Hello?’

‘Is that Major Black?’

It was a woman’s voice, shaky and tearful.

‘Yes.’ He had an idea that it was one he should recognize but he couldn’t immediately put a name to it.

‘Sorry to call you out of the blue like this.’ He sensed she was about to deliver bad news. ‘It’s Kathleen. Kathleen Finn. Ryan’s wife.’

Kathleen. Of course. Black felt his chest tighten.

She seemed unable to speak.

‘What’s happened?’

‘He’s working in Paris, as a bodyguard. He was meant to come home today … I just had a call from the British Embassy … They want me to go over and identify …’ She trailed off into sobs, unable to finish her sentence.

Black heard the sound of excited children in the background. The Finns had three, still all quite young as he recalled.

‘There’s a body and they’ve asked you to identify it, is that it?’ He heard himself speak as a soldier, clipped and emotionless.

‘Yes –’

‘Then I’ll go. You stay with the kids,’ Black said without a moment’s pause. ‘Give me the number of the person who called you and your email address. I’ll make contact and instruct him to route all communication through me. I’ll send you information as I receive it. I’m going to give you my mobile number, too – you can call me any time. Have you got a pen, Kathleen?’

She fought back tears and whispered a ‘yes’.

Black dictated his number and made her read it back to him, then took down the number of an Embassy official named Simon Johnson and all of Kathleen’s contact details, both of them finding reassurance in the practicality of the task.

‘Have you anyone to keep you company while you’re waiting?’ Black asked. ‘I shan’t be there until tomorrow morning.’

‘I can call my sister.’

‘Do that. It’s best not to be alone. I’ll be in touch the moment I’ve anything to report.’

There was a brief, awkward pause in which Black might have brought the conversation to a close, except that it felt somehow incomplete. He and Finn had worked side by side for twenty years. They had been closer than brothers and saved each other’s skins more times than he could recall. This was never meant to have happened. Finn was the one with family, Black the man whom scarcely anyone outside the Regiment would have come to mourn.

‘I’m sorry, Kathleen,’ Black said. ‘We haven’t been in touch for a long time. We should have been. It’s my fault.’

‘It was as much his as yours,’ she said. ‘He was always so busy, you know. He did mean to get in touch.’

‘Me, too,’ Black said.

They lapsed into another painful silence. Black put them out of their misery. ‘Goodbye, Kathleen.’

‘Goodbye. Thank you.’

He set down the phone and immediately picked it up again. He dialled the Paris number and got through to Simon Johnson, who sounded no older than a schoolboy. Black explained that he had been Finn’s commanding officer and arranged to come in Kathleen’s place. Johnson wasn’t certain the French police would accept the identification of a non-family member, but Black explained that in all likelihood he had spent more time in Finn’s close company and knew more about his habits than his wife. That seemed to satisfy the young official. They arranged to meet at the mortuary the following lunchtime.

Before he rang off, Black asked the question Johnson seemed to have been avoiding during their exchange: ‘Are you able to tell me how Mr Finn – if that is who he is – came by his death?’

‘It appears he was stabbed. Repeatedly. I’m afraid that’s all I know.’

‘I see … Thank you.’

Black put down the phone and walked over to the window. He stared out over the quad, feeling his sinews tighten and cold anger pulse through his veins.

Finn of all people. A man who had once fought his way out of a crazed Iraqi mob with his bare hands.

Death.

Black had wondered when it would next come to tap him on the shoulder.